This book [In
Defense of Animals] provides a platform for the new animal
liberation movement. A diverse group of people share this
platform: university philosophers, a zoologist, a lawyer, militant
activists who are ready to break the law to further their cause,
and respected political lobbyists who are entirely at home in
parliamentary offices. Their common ground is that they are all,
in their very different ways, taking part in the struggle for
animal liberation. This struggle is a new phenomenon. It marks an
expansion of our moral horizons beyond our own species and is thus
a significant stage in the development of human ethics. The aim of
this introduction is to show why the movement is so significant,
first by contrasting it with earlier movements against cruelty for
animals, and then by setting out the distinctive ethical stance
which lies behind the new movement.

Although there were one or
two nineteenth-century thinkers who asserted that animals have
rights, the serious political movement for animal liberation is
very young, a product of the 1970s. Its aims are quite distinct
from the efforts of the more traditional organizations, like the
Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to stop
people from treating animals cruelly. Even these traditional
concerns, however, are relatively recent when seen in the context
of 3,000 years of Western civilization, as a brief glance at the
historical background to the contemporary animal liberation
movement will show.

Concern for animal
suffering can be found in Hindu thought, and the Buddhist idea of
compassion is a universal one, extending to animals as well as
humans, but our Western traditions are very different. Our
intellectual roots lie in Ancient Greece and in the
Judeo-Christian tradition. Neither is kind to those not of our
species.

In the conflict between
rival schools of thought in Ancient Greece, it was the school of
Aristotle that eventually became dominant. Aristotle held the view
that nature is a hierarchy in which those with less reasoning
ability exist for the sake of those with more reasoning ability.
Thus plants, he said, exist for the sake of animals, and animals
for the sake of man, to provide him with food and clothing.
Indeed, Aristotle took his logic a step further- the barbarian
tribes, which he considered obviously less rational than the
Greeks, existed in order to serve as slaves to the more rational
Greeks. He did not quite have the nerve to add that philosophers,
being supremely rational, should be served by everyone else!

Nowadays we have rejected
Aristotle's idea that less rational human beings exist in order to
serve more rational ones, but to some extent we still retain that
attitude towards non-human animals. The social reformer Henry Salt
tells a story in his autobiography, Seventy Years Among Savages
(an account of a life lived entirely in England), of how, when
he was a master at Eton, he first broached the topic of
vegetarianism with a colleague, a distinguished science teacher.
With some trepidation he awaited the verdict of the scientific
mind on his new beliefs. It was: 'But don't you think that animals
were sent to us for food?' That response is not far from what
Aristotle might have said. It is even closer to the other great
intellectual tradition of the West — a tradition in which the
following words from Genesis stand as a foundation for everything
else:

And God said, Let us make
man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have domination
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over
the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing
that creepeth upon the earth.

So God created man in his
own image ....

And God blessed them, and
God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the
earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea,
and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that
moveth upon the earth.

Here is a myth to make
human beings feel their supremacy and their power. Man alone is
made in the image of God. Man alone is given dominion over all the
animals and told to subdue the earth. One may debate, as
environmentally concerned Jews and Christians have done, whether
this grant of dominion entitles human beings to rule as petty
despots, doing as they please with the unfortunate subjects placed
under their jurisdiction, or whether it was not rather a kind of
stewardship, in which humans are responsible to their Lord for the
proper care and use of what has been placed in their custody. One
can point to one or two Christian figures, like John Chrysostom
and Francis of Assisi, who have shown compassion and concern for
non-human Creation. (Though even the stories about Francis are
conflicting. There is one episode in which a disciple is said to
have cut a trotter off a living pig in order to give it to a sick
companion. According to the narrator, Francis rebuked the disciple
- but for damaging the property of the pig owner, not for cruelty
to the pig!) So far as the history of Western attitudes to animals
is concerned, however, the 'dominion' versus 'stewardship' debate
and that over the true nature of the teachings of Francis are both
beside the point. It is beyond dispute that mainstream
Christianity, for its first 1,800 years, put non-human animals
outside its sphere of concern. On this issue the key figures in
early Christianity were unequivocal. Paul scornfully rejected the
thought that God might care about the welfare of oxen, and the
incident of the Gadarene swine, in which Jesus is described as
sending devils into a herd of pigs and making them drown
themselves in the sea, is explained by Augustine as having been
intended to teach us that we have no duties towards animals. This
interpretation was accepted by Thomas Aquinas, who stated that the
only possible objection to cruelty to animals was that it might
lead to cruelty to humans - according to Aquinas, there was
nothing wrong in itself with making animals suffer. This
became the official view of the Roman Catholic Church to such good
— or bad — effect that as late as the middle of the nineteenth
century Pope Pius IX refused permission for the founding of a
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Rome, on the
grounds that to grant permission would imply that human beings
have duties to the lower creatures.

Even in England, which has
a reputation for being dotty about animals, the first efforts to
obtain legal protection for members of other species were made
only 180 years ago. They were greeted with derision. The Times
was so dismissive of the idea that the suffering of animals
ought to be prevented that it attacked proposed legislation that
would stop the 'sport' of bull-baiting. Said that august newspaper:
'Whatever meddles with the private personal disposition of man's
time or property is tyranny.' Animals, clearly, were just
property.

That was in
1800, and that Bill was defeated. It took another twenty years to
get the first anti-cruelty law on to the British statute books.
That any consideration at all should be given to the interests of
animals was a significant step beyond the idea that the boundary
of our species is also the boundary of morality. Yet the step was
a restricted one because it did not challenge our right to make
whatever use we chose of other species. Only cruelty -
causing pain when there was no reason for doing so but sheer
sadism or callous indifference - was prohibited. The farmer who
deprives his pigs of room to move does not offend against this
concept of cruelty, for he is considered to be doing only what he
thinks necessary to produce bacon. Similarly, the scientist who
poisons a hundred rats in order to determine the lethal dose of
some new flavouring agent for toothpaste is not regarded as cruel,
merely as concerned to follow the accepted procedures for testing
the safety of new products.

The
nineteenth-century anti-cruelty movement was built on the
assumption that the interests of non-human animals deserve
protection only when serious human interests are not at stake.
Animals
remained very clearly 'lower creatures' whose interests must be
sacrificed to our own in the event of conflict.

The
significance of the new animal liberation movement is its
challenge to this assumption. Taken in itself, say the animal
liberationists, membership of the human species is not morally
relevant. Other creatures on our planet also have interests. We
have always assumed that we are justified in overriding their
interests, but this bald assumption is simply species-selfishness.
If we assert that to have rights one must be a member of the human
race, and that is all there is to it, then what are we to say to
the racist who contends that to have rights you have to be a
member of the Caucasian race, and that is all there is to it?
Conversely, once we agree that race is not, in itself, morally
significant, how can species be? As Jeremy Bentham put it some 200
years ago:

The day may come
when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights
which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand
of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness
of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned
without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come
to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of
the
skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons
equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same
fate.

Someone might
say: 'It is not because we are members of the human species that
we are justified in overriding the interests of other animals; it
is because we are rational and they are not.' Someone else might
argue that it is because we are autonomous beings, or because we
can use language, or because we are self-conscious, or because we
have a sense of justice. All these contentions and more have been
invoked to justify us in sacrificing the interests of other
animals to our own.

One way of
replying would be to consider whether non-human animals really do
lack these allegedly important characteristics. The more we learn
of some non-human animals, particularly chimpanzees but also many
other species, the less able we are to defend the claim that we
humans are unique because we are the only ones capable of
reasoning, or of autonomous action or of the use of language, or
because we possess a sense of justice. I shall not go into this
reply here because it would take a long time and it would do
nothing for the many species of animals who could not be said to
meet whatever test was being proposed.

There is a much
shorter rejoinder. Let us return to the passage I have quoted from
Bentham, for he anticipated the objection. After dismissing the
idea that number of legs, roughness of skin or fine details of
bone formation should 'trace the insuperable line' between those
who have moral standing and those who do not, Bentham goes on to
ask what else might mark this boundary:

Is it the faculty of
reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown
horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a
more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even
a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it
avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they
talk? but, Can they suffer?

Bentham is
clearly right. Whatever the test we propose as a means of
separating human from non-human animals, it is plain that if all
non-human animals are going to fail it, some humans will fail as
well. Infants are neither rational nor autonomous. They do not use
language and they do not possess a sense of justice. Are they
therefore to be treated like non-human animals, to be fattened for
the table, if we should fancy the taste of their flesh, or to be
used to find out if some new shampoo will blister human eyeballs?

Ah, but infants, though
not rational, autonomous or able to talk, have the potential to
become adult humans — so the defender of human supremacy will
reply to Bentham. The relevance of potential is another
complicated argument that I shall avoid by the stratagem of
focusing your attention on another class of humans who would fail
the proposed test: those unfortunate enough to have been born with
brain damage so severe that they will never be able to reason, or
talk or do any of the other things that are often said to
distinguish us from non-human animals. The fact that we do not use
them as means to our ends indicates that we do not really see
decisive moral significance in rationality, or autonomy, or
language, or a sense of justice, or any of the other criteria said
to distinguish us from other animals. Why do we lock up
chimpanzees in appalling primate research centres and use them in
experiments that range from the uncomfortable to the agonising and
lethal, yet would never think of doing the same to a retarded
human being at a much lower mental level? The only possible
answer is that the chimpanzee, no matter how bright, is not human,
while the retarded human, no matter how dull, is.

This is speciesism, pure
and simple, and it is as indefensible as the most blatant racism.
There is no ethical basis for elevating membership of one
particular species into a morally crucial characteristic. From an
ethical point of view, we all stand on an equal footing -whether
we stand on two feet, or four, or none at all.

That is the crux of the
philosophy of the animal liberation movement, but to forestall
misunderstanding I had better say something immediately about this
notion of equality.

It does not mean
that animals have all the same rights as you and I have. Animal
liberationists do not minimize the obvious differences between
most members of our species and members of other species. The
rights to vote, freedom of speech, freedom of worship — none of
these can apply to other animals. Similarly, what harms humans may
cause much less harm, or even no harm at all, to some animals. If
I were to confine a herd of cows within the boundaries of the
county of, say, Devon, I do not think I would be doing them any
harm at all; if, on the other hand, I were to take a group of
people and restrict them to the same county, I am sure many would
protest that I had harmed them considerably, even if they were
allowed to bring their families and friends, and notwithstanding
the many undoubted attractions of that particular county. Humans
have interests in mountain-climbing and skiing, in seeing the
world and in sampling foreign cultures. Cows like lush pastures
and shelter from harsh weather. Hence to deny humans the right to
travel outside Devon would be to restrict their rights
significantly; it would not be a significant restriction of the
rights of cows.

Here is another example,
more relevant to real problems about our treatment of animals.
Suppose we decided to perform lethal scientific experiments on
normal adult humans, kidnapped at random from public parks for
this purpose. Soon every adult who entered a park would become
fearful of being kidnapped. The resultant terror would be a form
of suffering additional to whatever pain was involved in the
experiments themselves. The same experiments carried out on
non-human animals would cause less suffering overall, for the
non-human animals would not have the same anticipatory dread. This
does not mean, I hasten to add, that it is all right to experiment
on animals as we please, but only that if the experiment is to be
done at all, there is some reason, compatible with the
equal consideration of interests, for preferring to use non-human
animals rather than normal adult humans.

There is one point that
needs to be added to this example. Nothing in it depends on the
fact that normal adult humans are members of ~ our species.
It is their capacity for knowledge of what may happen to them that
is crucial. If they were not normal adults but severely
brain-damaged humans - orphans perhaps, or children abandoned by
their parents - then they would be in the same position as
non-human animals at a similar mental level. If we use the
argument I have put forward to justify experiments on non-human
animals, we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to
allow similar experiments on human beings with a similar degree of
awareness of what is happening to them. If we say that we will
perform an experiment on monkeys but not on brain-damaged human
orphans, we are giving preference to the humans just because they
are members of our own species, which is a violation of the
principle of equal consideration of interests.

In the example I have just
given the superior mental powers of normal adult humans would make
them suffer more. It is important to recognize that in other
circumstances the non-human animal may suffer more because it
cannot understand what is happening. If we capture a wild animal,
intending to release it later, it may not be able to distinguish
our relatively benign intentions from a threat to its life:
general terror may be all it experiences.

The moral significances of
taking life is more complex still. There is furious controversy
about the circumstances in which it is legitimate to kill human
beings, so it is no wonder that it should be difficult to decide
whether non-human animals have any right to life. Here I would
say, once again, that species in itself cannot make a difference.
If it is wrong to take the life of a severely brain-damaged
abandoned human infant, it must be equally wrong to take the life
of a dog or a pig at a comparable mental level. On the other hand,
perhaps it is not wrong to take the life of a brain-damaged
human infant - after all, many people think such infants should be
allowed to die, and an infant who is 'allowed to die' ends up just
as dead as one that is killed. Indeed, one could argue that our
readiness to put a hopelessly ill non-human animal out of its
misery is the one and only respect in which we treat animals
better than we treat people.

The influence of the
Judeo-Christian insistence on the God-like nature of human beings
is nowhere more apparent than in the standard Western doctrine of
the sanctity of human life: a doctrine that puts the life of the
most hopelessly and irreparably brain damaged human being — of the
kind whose level of awareness is not underestimated by the term
'human vegetable' - above the life of a chimpanzee. The sole
reason for this strange priority is, of course, the fact that the
chimpanzee is not a member of our species, and the human vegetable
is biologically human. This doctrine is now starting to be eroded
by the acceptance of abortion, which is the killing of a being
that is indisputably a member of the human species, and by the
questioning of the value of applying all the power of modern
medical technology to saving human life in all cases.

I think we will emerge
from the present decade with a significantly different attitude
towards the sanctity of human life, an attitude which considers
the quality of the life at stake rather than the simple matter of
whether the life is or is not that of a member of the species
Homo sapiens. Once this happens, we shall be ready to take a
much broader view of the wrongness of killing, one in which the
capacities of the being in question will play a central role. Such
a view will not discriminate on the basis of species alone but
will still draw a distinction between the seriousness of killing
beings with the mental capacities of normal human adults and
killing beings who do not possess, and never have possessed, these
mental capacities. It is not a bias in favour of our own species
that leads us to think that there is greater moral significance in
taking the life of a normal human than there is in taking the life
of, for example, a fish. To give just one reason for this
distinction, a normal human has hopes and plans for the future: to
take the life of a normal human is therefore to cut off these
plans and to prevent them from ever being fulfilled. Fish, I
expect, do not have as clear a conception of themselves as beings
with a past and a future. Consequently, to kill a fish is not to
prevent the fulfillment of any plans, or at least not of any
long-range future plans. This does not, I stress, mean that it is
all right, or morally trivial, to kill fish. If fish are capable
of enjoying their lives, as I believe they are, we do better when
we let them continue to live than when we needlessly end their
lives, though when we cut short the life of a fish, we are not
doing something as bad as when we needlessly end the life of a
normal human adult.

The animal liberation
movement, therefore, is not saying that all lives are of
equal worth or that all interests of humans and other animals are
to be given equal weight, no matter what those interests may be.
It is saying that where animals and humans have similar
interests - we might take the interest in avoiding physical pain
as an example, for it is an interest that humans clearly share
with other animals — those interests are to be counted equally,
with no automatic discount just because one of the beings is not
human. A simple point, no doubt, but nevertheless part of a
far-reaching ethical revolution.

This revolution is the
culmination of a long line of ethical development. I cannot do
better than quote the words of that splendid nineteenth century
historian of ideas, W. E. H. Lecky. In his History of European
Morals Lecky wrote: 'At one time the benevolent affections
embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes
first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then
all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings
of man with the animal world.' Lecky anticipated what the animal
liberationists are now saying. In an earlier stage of our
development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of
the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be
robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of
protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not
include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped
to America and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded
Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are
hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly
racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now
progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory
farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling,
seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter and the destruction of
wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of
ethics. The essays which follow show how this can be done, both in
theory and in practice.